Clifford Orwin calls Quebec's niqab ban "unreasonable persecution"

March 29, 2010

Bad news comes in bunches. First there was Quebec’s Bill 94, which would refuse government services, public employment, educational opportunities and even most medical care to Muslim women wearing the niqab. Then there was the Angus Reid poll showing that 80 per cent of all Canadians agree with this measure. Evidently Abe Lincoln was right. You can fool (almost) all the people some of the time. You can fool them into unreasonable persecution of their fellow citizens.

Yes, Canada, some of those fellow citizens, being Muslim, dress so as to conceal more of themselves than do their sisters of other faiths. And yes, their veil bears a name so unfamiliar as to sound downright un-Canadian. They pay taxes, however, in the very same currency as we do, and are entitled to the very same services. They cannot be denied these for exercising their religious freedom.

Yes, their religious freedom. Forget about “multiculturalism”: The issue here is both older and more fundamental. It’s the right of every resident of a liberal state to conduct herself as she thinks pleasing to God, on the sole condition that such conduct not violate the rights of others. And while wearing a niqab may send some observers into a high dudgeon, it impairs neither their civil interests nor their religious ones. To paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, whether their neighbour wears no niqab or three niqabs neither picks their pocket nor breaks their bones.

True, this right to free religious expression is as subject to regulation as all other rights where the legitimate secular interests of society require it. So, for instance, Quebec may require that niqabs be made of flame-resistant material, not be produced by child labour or by processes harmful to the environment, and contain no wool from endangered species of sheep. It may even decide that, in certain cases (in airport or other security queues, for example), even the most modest woman may be subject to body searches, conducted with as much delicacy as circumstances permit. (If a woman prefers to forgo flying rather than submit to such a search, that’s her decision.) In a liberal state, just as religion must afford no ground for preference or discrimination, so it confers no immunity from the state’s reasonable demands.

Continue reading Clifford Orwin’s editorial at globeandmail.com.